Each year the incoming freshmen class and transfer students partake in a week long program called Earn Your Wings, but this year there were a few changes to the traditional schedule.
Staffed by the Student Life Office and upperclassmen, Earn Your Wings is the week before classes start and feature festivities that are geared to help the class get acquainted with the campus and with each other.
Previously Earn Your Wings included a short stay at Dry Gulch, U.S.A. – a wild west themed summer camp and retreat center in Adair, Oklahoma. Due to budget cuts, the venue was removed from this year’s Earn Your Wings experience.
“After thinking about the week more, I hope that we never go back to Dry Gulch,” senior Braeden Fair, a director of Earn Your Wings, said. “…I think it’s beneficial for the freshmen because they don’t get thrown on a bus and taken away from the place they just got to. They get more familiar and hang out with each other in the environment they’ll be in for the next nine months.”
This year’s Earn Your Wings program consisted of new events, including a Color Run and an Oklahoma Christian garage sale.
“The color run was something that I’ve never done and a lot of people probably won’t ever do because they don’t like to run,” senior Hannah McKenzie, a director of Earn Your Wings, said. “I think that was a cool opportunity for the freshmen and the staff. It was a cool thing for OC to put on because then they could maybe do it in the future and know how it works.”
This year’s incoming new students participated in the first Oklahoma Christian apparel garage sale, which was organized by senior Renee Pedersen.
“The garage sale was originally Hannah’s idea,” Pedersen said. “I think she basically came up with it because she was going through all of her t-shirts and realizing that she had so many OC t-shirts and tried to think of a way we could use them in Earn Your Wings.”
The garage sale featured over 750 donated Oklahoma Christian clothing items from current students, alumni, sports teams and departments. Overall, this event raised $1,600 for The Havens, an orphanage in Zambia, Africa.
“I think it was a good event because giving them OC apparel before they start school is just another way to welcome them into the community and make them feel like they belong here,” Pedersen said. “They have just as much right to be here as students who have been here for three or four years.”
The students also enjoyed a concert in the Myriad Gardens amphitheater in downtown Oklahoma City featuring the Summer Singers and Vanderzees, an Oklahoma Christian alumni duo.
“If you show people what you have to offer outside of your campus, they’re going to buy into being here more,” Fair said. “You don’t come to college just for the degree; you come for the experience. So, we gave them that experience and I think it got them excited about the year.”
Among all of the new experiences a former tradition resurfaced that had an impact on the incoming class.
Ten years ago, incoming students were taken to the Oklahoma City National Memorial to remember the victims, survivors and those forever changed by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
“It was really cool because Brad Robison talked to us about the history behind the memorial,” McKenzie said. “A lot of people go and walk around, but they don’t get to hear about the little details and everything that has been put in there for a purpose. It was a cool way to expose the freshmen to how Oklahoma’s community and family really unite together in hard times.”
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